D&D General Elon Musk Wants To Know 'How Much Is Hasbro?'

Following the richest man in the world's attack on Wizards of the Coast for two paragraphs in the 500-page celebration of D&D, The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977, Elon Musk--who bought Twitter not that long ago--wants to know how much D&D's owner Hasbro would cost.

After the public sharing on Twitter of Jason Tondro's (who wrote the book’s foreword) private Facebook posts, Musk replied "How much is Hasbro?"

Hasbro's estimated capitalization is currently $8.71 billion, with $3.95 billion of debt.

It was on 21st December 2017 when Musk similarly enquired "How much is it?" before proceeding to make a bid for Twitter. He later tried to back out of the deal, but was forced to buy the platform for $44 billion in June 2022. Current estimates by investment firm Fidelity put the platform at a value 80% less than when he bought it, with a worth of only about $9.4 billion.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think the most likely scenario is that he'd hand D&D over to some kind of orbiter/reply guy of his who is an edgelord-y OSR type, or maybe someone like or even exactly Justin LaNasa, but we can't predict who that would be.

I'm confident the worst people in the RPG publishing industry are in his DMs right now.

 

[jayoungr]

during the OGL scandal D^D Beyond kept growing and barely even felt the boycott.

Source for this? Because most people seem to think that the mass account cancellations on D&D Beyond were what got WotC to actually listen to the complaints. It may have bounced back right away afterward, but during the scandal, all sources I've seen agree that it did indeed feel the boycott.

 

[Sacrosanct]

This is true, and something glossed over by Grignards who insist that D&D was always inclusive. In, what, July of 1980, The Dragon ran an article about the sexism faced by female gamers. This was a known issue even then.

Grog: "D&D was always inclusive"

Googles D&D club in the 80s. 9 out of 10 people in every photo is a white male.

"Inclusive". I don't think that word means what you think it means.--Vizzini

*I started in 1981 and I didn't even meet my first female gamer until 1992, but I try to stay away from anecdotal experience on things like this, because a lot of the grognards making that claim like to say "I had a female in my group, so it was totally inclusive!"

 

[Parmandur]

I wonder which would get most of the market in a 'post-DnD' world? Level up A5e and Tales of the Valiant both resemble 5e a lot more. Pathfinder 2e is pretty large, but as it's so crunchy it puts off many casual players. And then Daggerheart is also trying to become one of the larger systems, seemingly catering to the same crowd.

Or would a 'Pathfinder' happen again, where a brand new system appears from nowhere and quickly leaps in popularity.

Depressingly, D&D would still dominate most likely, just that 12 year olds would get reactionary programming.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

None, their is a big difference between people loudly complaining here and the actual market, during the OGL scandal D^D Beyond kept growing and barely even felt the boycott.

This is complete nonsense. D&D Beyond got so many cancellations that the entire site crashed. Exactly what the economic impact was remains open to debate, but they felt it, for sure.

 

[Parmandur]

Source for this? Because most people seem to think that the mass account cancellations on D&D Beyond were what got WotC to actually listen to the complaints. It may have bounced back right away afterward, but during the scandal, all sources I've seen agree that it did indeed feel the boycott.

Cocks said it several times in investor calls, and the numbers of users for Beyond seem to have kept climbing. The Creatice Commons release seems to have taken the wind out of any boycott sails longterm.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This is complete nonsense. D&D Beyond got so many cancellations that the entire site crashed. Exactly what the economic impact was remains open to debate, but they felt it, for sure.

Exactly. Clearly whatever was going on, whether it really hurt WotC financially or not, scared WotC, and caused them to turn absolutely 180 on the OGL 2.0, not only banishing it from existence entirely, but actually coming back the other way and making D&D's SRD into CCBY, which I don't think anyone expected.

 

[Some Dude]

Actually it make sense. The far right have been buying media forever, creating an entire consistent unified media sphere of propaganda and lies. See XTwitter. It makes sense to extend that into game platforms.

It's not about the money. It's about raw political power. When you start a coup in the 70s, you take out the radio and TV stations.

This is also because much of the GOP is made up of "Seven Mountains" Dominionists, who are closer than ever to achieving their goals.

Dominion theology - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Morrus]

Source for this? Because most people seem to think that the mass account cancellations on D&D Beyond were what got WotC to actually listen to the complaints. It may have bounced back right away afterward, but during the scandal, all sources I've seen agree that it did indeed feel the boycott.

Although we would all like to think that was the case, Chris Cocks confirmed at least once in an investor call that that wasn’t so. While WotC did indeed backtrack, it’s wasn’t due to financial aspects. I suspect there were two camps inside the company but the exact details of what went on behind the scenes won’t be known until somebody there at the time tells-all. But no, the evidence suggests that DDB cancellations were not as significant as we’d have thought.

 

[beaumontsebos]

It's amazing the lengths this spoiled brat will go to in order to soothe his fragile ego.